Via Google News, this story from July 22:
A highly explosive chemical, radioactive substances and more hazardous materials found at a late chemist's house in Lexington brought out the Massachusetts State Police Bomb Squad for a complex removal Monday, officials said.
A hazmat team and an FBI bomb technician were also part of the response prompted by a clean-out of a home on Longfellow Road, state and local fire officials said Tuesday. Lexington fire officials called in the help after finding dozens of bottles of powders, liquids and solids, including the highly explosive chemical picric acid and fire hazards.
Police and firefighters secured the area around the home while hazmat and bomb technicians entered and carefully searched it, organizing the materials and removing them to a truck filled with sand over about seven hours. Officials said that an ambulance and firefighters with a charged hose were on standby, just in case.
It's not like local ACS sections don't already have plenty of things to do and not enough resources, but volunteering to help fire departments with household chemical troves might be a good one.
*maybe the right idea is a "chemical will", i.e. you write out an inventory for the authorities?
My retired former boss just stopped by last week to drop off some of his personal chemical collection for us to put in our lab waste. Nothing scary like picric acid; just coatings and adhesives adjacent stuff that he would DIY formulate for household repairs. I asked him if he was getting ready to sell his house, and he said he isn't doing that just yet, but he's afraid his non-scientist wife will have a problem when he dies. I could see a big dramatic overreaction with the bomb squad, hazmat team, and TV news crews showing up for a mostly innocuous collection of resins and curing agents.
ReplyDeleteCurious about the source and purpose of the radioactive material. Suppose the situation could be anything from a "Nuclear Boy Scout" to a bunch of Depression glass to maybe having a sample of something like tritium?
ReplyDeleteGreat post!
ReplyDeleteI must say I've never once thought of bringing anything from work home to play around with, but maybe it's just that I have lots of pets and now also have a couple of small children running around. My mother did have a box of chemicals that she used to teach chemistry to advanced kids at the local elementary school when I was younger, not sure if that's hiding in a closet back at home now or if she's tossed those.
Early in my career, a retired high school chemistry teacher told me a story about picric acid and the bomb squad. I cannot remember when this incident happened to him, but probably around 50 years ago. This teacher oversaw the chemical storeroom, and his department head had asked him if they had any picric acid in the storeroom. Some type of incident was in the news involving an old jar of picric acid exploding so the management was concerned. He told them yes and part of his monthly duties was to keep the vermiculite around the jar wet to ensure the contents in the jar would stay hydrated. The department head called the bomb squad anyways. Which was fine, it was not like they were making picrates of unknowns anymore. The day they arrived; he brought the picric acid to them. When he walked over to them carrying the jar in the can overpacked in wet vermiculite. They “freaked out” and ordered him to carefully set the can down on a table. As he described it “…with sweat pouring down the technician’s face he careful used long metal tongs to pick up the can and set it in a large metal box and sighed relief that the crisis was over once he closed the metal box and locked it closed…”
ReplyDeleteWe both agreed that if this was a dried-out bottle bottle of picric acid, they just made a shrapnel bomb.